Thoughts On Recycling

Cooler temperatures today made a perfect background for trying Kim’s Homemade Tomato Soup. Rye bread (for grilled ham and swiss) in the bread machine and the soup in the crockpot reminded me how grateful am that food preparation for many things need not take all morning. As I was assembling the soup, I tossed some cans in the trash, then caught myself.

We are starting to recycle. The day I began, I found this nifty list of all the items that Sims, our local trash and scrap hauler, will take, and quickly printed it up. As I go through my day now, though, I am realizing the challenge for me in the habit of not throwing everything away. I’ll have to start a little at a time. So, we’ll just do paper, plastic, glass and cans for now. 🙂 Luke would like to see us composting food waste and burning our paper at the new house. Then, if everything else can be earmarked for the recycling bin, we won’t need to hire trash service. I was inspired by Robyn’s small grocery bag holding their trash- that could be us, too, if we put our minds to it.

Along the same lines- I had an old copy of Country Living sitting on the counter, and just before I pitched it (in the paper bin 🙂 ) I noticed some beautiful rugs on one page. They are called Potholder Rugs, because they look and are made much like their smaller counterparts. But get a load of that pricetag- $75 for something that will be under my feet? I don’t think so. Even back when the girls started their potholder business, I was brainstorming ways to make bigger pieces the same way. Thanks be to Google, I found this article a few entries down from the expensive rugs during my search. The author has a way of using her dining table legs to act as the loom for her to make a woven rug! Sweet! Just the kind of recycling project I could get into, or under. There is nothing like reusing something AND saving money at the same time. Now I just need to find some shirts we don’t want anymore…

One Reply to “Thoughts On Recycling”

It WAS hard to get used to, like you said, to not throw everything away when we first started using the tiny trash can, but we haven’t bought another single trash bag ever since we started using the small grocery bags for our trash. 🙂

I did buy a tiny trash can to keep under the sink, and we still use the grocery bags as liners.

We used to fill a very large trash can every day, but buying things in bulk, saving jars for canning, and composting our food scraps cut our garbage down to 1/4 of what it used to be. It was an amazing change and didn’t take too much effort to change our habits.